Here is a very quick tip, probably something that you already know, but if not then now you do:  the way to redial a number on the iPhone.  This was one of the dozens of tips that Ben Stevens and I discussed last month during our ABA TECHSHOW presentation.  There are two ways to redial in the Phone app.

First, you can tap the Recents tab at the bottom.  This will show you all of the people who you have recently called or who have recently called you.  Just tap a name to call.

Second, you can redial from the keypad.  You won’t see a redial button on the screen, but if you don’t type any number at all and just hit the Call button, the iPhone will present you with the last number that you dialed.  Tap the Call button a second time and the iPhone will redial that number.  Thus, two taps of the Call button get you a quick redial of the last number that you called.

Apple has traditionally been reluctant to approve of third party apps that duplicate built-in functions on the iPhone, and thus Safari has been the only web browser on the iPhone.  There are third party web browsers in the App Store, and many apps include a built-in web browsing function, but all of those apps have used Apple’s WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari.

Late last night, that changed when Apple approved the Opera Mini web browser and added it to the App Store.  Just the fact that this app was approved in the first place is a significant event.  As noted in the New York Times back in 2008, Opera had started working on a web browser for the iPhone soon after Apple allowed third parties to write apps, but the company stopped development once it became clear that Apple would not approve an alternative to its own Safari browser.  But for whatever reason, Opera went ahead and wrote the app anyway and submitted it to Apple last month, Apple surprised everyone by approving the app yesterday, and now we have the free Opera Mini on the iPhone as an alternative to Safari.

The main advantage of Opera Mini is speed when you are connecting via Edge or 3G.  Unlike the Safari app which presents you with the “full internet” on the iPhone, when you request a web site in Opera Mini the request goes to the Opera server, which gets the page, compresses it up to 90%, reformats it for a mobile phone screen, and then sends it to the iPhone.  Because much less data is sent to the iPhone, pages display faster.

The difference is most notable if you are on an Edge connection, where Opera displays a website much faster than Safari; Opera claims up to six times faster.  On 3G, Opera still feels faster but the effect is not quite as dramatic, and on Wi-Fi there is virtually no speed advantage.  For example, Greg Kumparak of Mobile Crunch ran a speed test and found that on 3G, sites loaded two or three times as fast as Safari, but on Wi-Fi, sites loaded just about as fast on both Opera Mini and Safari although Opera Mini had a very slight advantage.  In addition to the speed advantage there is also a data advantage; if you are not on an unlimited data plan (for example you are traveling internationally), you will appreciate using less data to view the same website.

Unfortunatley, you pay a price for the speed and reduced data.  Pages frequently look worse in Opera than they do in Safari, with text not wrapping around graphics the right way or graphics not being sized correctly.  Websites are still completely functional, just sometimes not as pretty and less legible when you are viewing the entire page.  Here are two examples with Opera on the left and Safari on the right:

Although it is difficult to read a webpage in Safari in full page view, you can still double tap on a column of text (just like in Safari) to zoom and read that text.

In addition to the speed advantage on Edge and 3G, Opera has some other unique advantages.  First, the default blank page in Opera can hold shortcuts up to nine of your favorite sites.  Hold down on one of the icons and a pop-up menu will appear letting you change the shortcut.

Second, the app has an interesting method of using multiple tabs so that you can have different websites open at the same time.  Tap on the tabs button and a strip will pop up with overlapping square icons that you can tap to jump to a page.  Unlike Safari, which limits you to 9 tabs, you can open many more tabs in Opera Mini.  (If there is a limit, I haven’t figured it out yet.)  And switching between tabs in Opera Mini seems to be faster than doing so in Safari.  If you like tabbed browsing on an iPhone, I suspect that you’ll be a fan of Opera Mini.

Third, the app has some very useful tools that you access by tapping the wrench icon.  Three that I particularly like are (1) the ability to save a webpage so that you can instantly load it again later and (2) a useful Find in Page feature that gives you the ability to search for text within a webpage, with the terms highlighted and a Next button that lets you quickly find each instance of the word.

You can pinch to zoom in Opera, but unlike Safari where you can zoom to any level, in Opera you only have two zoom levels — the entire webpage, or zoomed in on the text.  You can select text, but the implementation is more cumbersome than in Safari; you have to hold down your finger, then choose select text from a pop-up menu, then drag to select the text.  And sometimes, the app doesn’t correctly register that you are trying to select text.  On the plus side, Opera does give you a fast option to run a Google search based on selected text.  When you scroll down a webpage, you will see that pictures further down are not fully loaded although they do load as you scroll.

The Settings screen gives you several options to make Opera even more efficient.  For example, you can adjust the image quality to make pictures load even faster (or turn off loading images completely).  If you use Opera on your desktop computer, you can also use Opera link to sync between the two (although I didn’t test that option).

Opera is new to the iPhone, but Opera Mini has been around on other smartphones for a while.  Indeed, the debut version of Opera Mini for iPhone is version 5.0.  While Opera Mini has been around the block and thus you would expect a solid app on the iPhone, I still consider Safari on the iPhone a much more polished browser overall.  Nevertheless, I encourage you to download Opera Mini, especially considering that it is free.  If you ever find yourself on a slow Edge connection, web browsing can be much faster on Opera Mini than on Safari.  If you ever want to save a bunch of webpages to view later (perhaps when you don’t have a web connection), Opera Mini lets you do that.  And the Find in Page feature is great, and I am sure that I will use Opera Mini at times in the future just for this feature — at least, until Apple adds it to Safari, which I hope that they do soon.  (Yes, I know that there are currently javascripts that you can use in Safari to find text in webpages, but they always feel like hacks to me.)  It is significant that Apple approved Opera Mini at all, and because of the unique features of Opera Mini, I am sure that lots of people will download it for occasional use at those times when the unique advantages of Opera make it a better choice than Safari.

Click here to get Opera Mini (free): 

The big news late last week was, of course, iPhone software 4.0, so I did not post an “In the news” segment this past Friday.  Thus, today is a special Monday version of the latest iPhone-related news that has caught my eye.

• Palm Beach, Florida lawyer Christopher Hopkins wrote a free app containing the Florida Rules of Professional Conduct, plus the Southern
  
  District guidelines and local bar rules for Broward/Fort
  
  Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach.  Click here for CLaw — Florida Rules of Professional Conduct (free):

  

• Today, Adobe is releasing Flash Professional CS5, software used to write Flash apps.  One of the marquee features of this new version was supposed to be the ability to write an iPhone app using Flash, but late last week Apple prohibited this in its developer rules.  John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote an interesting article speculating on why Apple was doing this, and according to Engadget, Steve Jobs himself seems to like what Gruber said.
• There are lots of different iPhone GPS apps out there to assist you when driving, and Engadget recently tested and rated some of the more popular ones.  Note that they did not test MotionX GPS Drive, the one that I have been using.
• Dan Moren of Macworld reports that actor Justin Long says that the “Get a Mac” ads that he does with John Hodgman may be over.
• Did you ever notice that all of the official Apple pictures of the
  
  iPhone display the time 9:42 and the official iPad pictures display
  
  9:41?  Have you ever wondered why?  iPhone developer Jon Manning ran
  
  into Apple Senior VP Scott Forstall at an Apple Store on iPad launch day
  
  and asked him. 
  
  To get the thrilling answer, read
  
  Manning’s blog entry, and then read Harry McCracken’s article on
  
  Technologizer for the rest of the story.
• I always enjoy reading stories of people using MobileMe to track down a stolen iPhone, and C.W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle has a new one.  Unfortunately, he also reports that iPhone crime is very frequent in San Francisco, and he quotes San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Brian Buckelew as saying:  “Probably half the
  
  robberies in the city are iPhones. Some days there are three iPhone
  
  robberies on the court calendar.”
• Last year, I reviewed Gogo, a Wi-Fi service that you can use with your iPhone on many airplanes.  If you travel often, you may be interested in this Electronista article which notes that you can now get a $35 per month unlimited plan that works on all Gogo flights, even services offered on different airlines.
• Marco Tabini of Macworld reports that the iPhone was easily the winner of the 2010 J.D. Power smarphone satisfaction survey.
• The Week has created a list of “The 10 Stupidest Apple Apps Ever.”
• The iPad continues to dominate the news, and here are a few iPad stories that I think are worth reading.  First. TUAW reports that someone placed an iPad for sale on eBay for $5,000 with the provision that the seller would personally deliver the iPad to any international airport in the world on April 3, the day that the iPad came out.  Apparently the offer appealed to someone who doesn’t live in the U.S. but wanted an iPad on Day 1, as the eBay listing shows that the item was sold for $5,000.  The TUAW article also reports that someone else in the UK reportedly spent $5,500 for an iPad.
• Dan Frakes of Macworld has an excellent post on how the iPad works with existing accessories that were made for the iPhone or iPod.
• Attorney David Shulman writes about the use of the iPad by lawyers.
• iPad Notebook is a blog about the iPad by lawyer Justin Kahn.
• Dr. Joel Topf speculates that the iPad may be the “next great thing” that Steve Jobs first spoke about in 1996.
• PC World stress tested the iPad and found it to be rather strong.  You can damage it by dropping it or getting it wet, but not by scratching it.  “Its well-coated screen is literally scratch-proof: We couldn’t
  
  produce any scratches on the display even when we tried to etch it with
  
  a nail; you definitely won’t need to buy one of those stick-on screen
  
  protectors.  The glass did start showing signs of physical
  
  damage after a couple of drops onto concrete. But even in those extreme
  
  circumstances, the screen cracked only after we dropped the iPad
  
  face-down onto the pavement.”
• Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times describes some of the best iPad apps.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an excellent review of the iPad.
• And finally, Blendtec answers the question, will the iPad blend:

Yesterday, Apple previewed the next version of the iPhone operating software, version 4.0, which is
due out this summer.  You can watch a video of the presentation by Steve Jobs on the Apple website.  Jobs announced that there are now over 185,000 apps in the App Store, that users have downloaded over 4 billion apps, and that Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones (plus another 35 million iPod touches).  Scott Forstall of Apple announced that over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies are using iPhones.

But the star of the show was the new features in iPhone software 4.0.  Apple says that there are over 100 new features for iPhone users, and here are the ones that I think that lawyers and other professionals using iPhones will really love.

1. Multitasking: fast app switching.  Instead of closing one app to launch another app, you can now quickly switch between apps with each app freezing its current state until you return.  This will increase your efficiency using multiple apps at the same time on your iPhone, such as switching back and forth between Mail, Safari and a third party app while you are drafting an e-mail, just to pick one example.
2. Multitasking: VOIP in the background.  With 4.0, Voice over IP will be supported in the background, which makes the
   
   Skype app 100x more useful.  With 4.0, while you are doing something else on your iPhone, Skype will still be able to ring you when a call comes in.  Plus, you can continue talking to someone over Skype while switching to another app, such as checking your e-mail or your calendar. 
   
   For people traveling internationally who want to use Skype to talk to
   
   people in the U.S. for pennies instead of paying expensive roaming fees,
   
   this is huge.
3. Multitasking: audio in the background.  The iPod app has always been able to play audio in the background while you use another app.  With 4.0, third party apps can do this too — making the Pandora app all the more useful.  
4. Other multitasking features.  Those first three multitasking features will probably be the ones that lawyers find most useful, but in addition it is nice that under 4.0 (1) apps will have improved abilities to send you pop-up notifications, (2) apps can complete certain tasks (like upload a picture or video) while you switch to another app, and (3) social networking type apps will be able to track your location even when the app is running in the background (and Apple will notify you of this so that an app cannot track your location without your knowledge).  These three features are less important for attorneys, but may be useful at times.
5. Mail: attachments and third party apps.  We spend a lot of time in the Mail app, so it is great to see some major improvements.  First, with 4.0 you will be able to open an attachment to an e-mail directly into a third party app.  I hope that this means that 4.0 will let you choose from among several possible apps, so for example if you have a Word attachment you can choose to open it directly from Mail into apps like Quickoffice or Documents to Go.  Those apps currently have creative work-arounds for accessing attachments to your e-mails, but direct access would be much more efficient.  I much prefer viewing Word, PDF and Excel files that are attached to an e-mail in Quickoffice or Documents to Go, so anything that makes it easier to do so is a welcome improvement.
6. Mail: unified inbox.  Most of us have multiple e-mail accounts such as Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc., and 4.0 will let you have a single Mail inbox to view all of your e-mails at once, much like the Mail application on a Mac does.  Or if you want to keep your accounts separate, 4.0 will give you much faster inbox switching.
7. Mail: threaded messages.  With 4.0 you can organize e-mails by thread, making it much easier to view an original e-mail and all of the replies.
8. Mail: better MS Exchange support.  Most large law firms, and many smaller ones, use Microsoft Exchange for e-mail.  iPhone software 4.0 adds support for Exchange Server 2010, plus adds the ability to access multiple Exchange accounts.
9. Mail: spell check.  Mail and other apps have spell check in 4.0. The iPad already includes a spell check feature, and I imagine that the feature will work the same way in 4.0 for the iPhone.
10. Mail and other apps: external Bluetooth keyboards.  If you need to write a long e-mail or a significant insert for a document on an iPhone, with 4.0, you can pair your iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard to make it much easier to type all of those words.  This makes it easier to decide to leave your laptop at home and just travel with an iPhone and a small keyboard to use when you need to type something long on your plane or in a hotel room.  There are already many small, portable Bluetooth keyboards such as the iGo Stowaway Ultra-Slim Bluetooth Keyboard

    

    or even Apple’s own Wireless Keyboard

    

    , but I imagine that very soon we will see some nice portable keyboards specifically designed for an iPhone running 4.0.  This will make apps like Quickoffice and Documents to Go even more useful because, for the first time, you might actually decide to use those apps as word processors.
11. Organize apps into folders.  The only way to organize your apps now is to move them to separate pages, but this is not ideal when you have a lot of apps.  Under 4.0, you will be able to drag one app onto another one to group those apps into a folder, and then drag other apps into that folder.  Thus, you can keep all of your legal statute apps in a single folder, one which remains on your first or second home screen (or even in your dock) but which doesn’t take up numerous spaces.  I have been wishing for a feature like this for a long time, and I can’t wait to use it. 
12. Display more apps.  Folders are not just an organizational tool; they also let you display more apps on your iPhone.  If you are an app junkie like me with tons of apps, you know that the iPhone can currently display only 11 pages of 16 apps per page, which is 176 apps, plus the four apps at the bottom for a total of 180 apps.  You can store more than 180 apps on your iPhone, but they do not show up on your home page screens so you can only access them using search.  Jobs said that the folders in 4.0 allow you to display up to 2,160 apps on your iPhone.  (2,160 divided by 180 is 12; so perhaps that means that each folder can hold up to 12 apps.)
13. iBooks.  The larger iPad is far superior for reading iBooks, but if you have both an iPad and an iPhone, it will be useful to be able to read a book on the iPhone as well.  Your current page will sync, so if you are up to page 156 in a book on your iPad and then you have a few minutes of down time with your iPhone, you can read a few more pages and the iPhone will know where you left off.
14. Improved security.  Security is important for lawyers, and in 4.0, all of the e-mails and attachments on your iPhone can be encrypted with your PIN code.  (It was unclear whether this was automatic or a feature to be turned on.)  Plus, app developers will be given the tools to encrypt all data in their apps as well.  Another security enhancement in 4.0 is improved tools for a company to manage all of the iPhones used by employees.  Additionally, 4.0 supports SSL VPN for improved security in VPN sessions.

There are many other new features in iPhone software 4.0 that lawyers might enjoy, although they are unlikely to improve your billable hours.  For example, with 4.0 you can add a wallpaper to your home screen.  If you like games, 4.0 enhances support for multiplayer games and makes it easy for your friends to send you a message on your iPhone asking you to join a game, plus you can compare your high scores with those of your friends.  

If you like to take videos on your iPhone, with 4.0 you can tap to change the focus while you are recording a video.  If you take a photo in the wrong orientation, with 4.0 you can rotate a picture on the iPhone.

4.0 also supports a slick advertising feature that Apple calls iAds.  You may question whether adding ads to your iPhone is a “feature.”  As John Moltz humorously noted on his website:

iAds. AWESOME. Now we can watch ads on our iPhones. YES. At long last.
The feature we’ve all be asking for. Our long national nightmare is
over. All hail our wise corporate overlords who always have our best
interests at heart. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

The counter argument is that iAds will encourage developers to create more free, ad-supported ads.  Time will tell whether iAds bring us better free apps.

Note that not all iPhones will be able to support iPhone software 4.0.  It doesn’t appear that the original iPhone will run 4.0 at all.  [UPDATE 4/12/10:  Engadget reports that Steve Jobs confirms this.]  An iPhone 3G can run some features, but not the ones that require more horsepower such as multitasking.  An iPhone 3GS can take advantage of all of the features in 4.0.  If you don’t own an iPhone 3GS, 4.0 will be a compelling reason to upgrade once Apple releases the next version of the iPhone this Summer.  4.0 will also come to the iPad, but not until this Fall.

Developers can now download iPhone software 4.0, and as they tinker with it over the next few months, I’m sure that we will learn more about the great new features in 4.0.  But from what we learned yesterday about 4.0, it is clear that lawyers and other professionals using the iPhone will see a lot to love.

Apple is announcing details on the new iPhone Software 4.0 today at
10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern.  If you are in the Central time zone like I am, why not have lunch at your desk on Thursday and read about all of the exciting announcements as they happen.  Many websites will be providing live
coverage of the Apple event.  Here are the ones that I recommend, based on the quality of their prior coverage of similar Apple announcements, including the links to where the sites should provide their live coverage:

• Engadget
• GDGT
• Macworld
• Technologizer
• Gizmodo
• CNET
• Ars Technica
• TUAW
• TWiT (live video commentary)

If you ever have the need to annotate documents, such as fill out a form or add some text to a document, Touch-Fill-Go is a neat iPhone app that can scan a paper document to create a PDF file or import a PDF file, add annotations such as text or a signature, and then e-mail the annotated PDF file or send the file to another iPhone via Bluetooth.  There is room for improvement, but this app is very handy.  It regularly sells for $4.99, but it just went on sale for $2.99 for a limited time, and at only $3 I think it is an app that many lawyers and others will want to get.

 

You add a document to Touch-Fill-Go one of two ways.  First, if you have the document in paper form, you can use the iPhone camera to scan the document.  To assist you in making the scan straight, the app displays a white grid on top of the document that you are scanning, and the app turns the grid green at the best time to take the picture.  In my experience, it was very difficult to tap the screen and take the picture at exactly the moment that the grid is green, but the camera still did a decent job capturing the image.  Once the image is captured the app will analyze the image to try to optimize the image quality and orientation.

 

Once the image is analyzed, you can then adjust the image by cropping the sides (useful to make sure that only the document itself remains, cutting out the edges), by rotating the image and by manually adjusting the brightness and contrast.

Alternatively, you can import a file that is already in your Photo Library on your iPhone, or you can import a PDF that is available at a website.  To use that last feature, you enter an address in the app’s web browser and then find a PDF that is online.  For example, I downloaded an attorney admission from from the U.S. Supreme Court website.

Once the file is ready, either because you scanned it or you imported it, you can then annotate the file.  If you are filing out a form, the app does a decent job of automatically detecting most fields such as lines and checkboxes, or you can manually tell the app where you want to type.  If you start to enter text that you have typed in the past, the app offers suggestions so that you don’t have to fully type the text again.  You can control the font and size, and after text is entered you can easily move it around or scale it larger or smaller.

 

In addition to adding text, you can place a checkmark in a box, and you can even add a signature, which you can scale so that it is the right size on a line.

Once you are done, you can store the file in the app itself, and the app includes folders to keep files organized.  You can use Bluetooth to send the file to another iPhone.  Or, and most usefully, you can send the annotated file as a PDF attachment to an e-mail.

I was very impressed with the abilities of this app.  The annotation feature is impressive, and the ability to take a physical document and easily create a digital PDF file is very useful.  Having said that, there are several areas for improvement that would make this app even better.  First, I wish that there were additional ways to get PDF files into the app, such as the ability to e-mail a file to the app.  The Zosh app that I reviewed last year is similar to Touch-Fill-Go and it allows you to do just that.  Zosh does not let you scan physical documents to create a PDF, but if you already have a file in PDF form, it is a lot easier to get that file into Zosh.  Similarly, it would be nice if Touch-Fill-Go could access PDF files on cloud storage services such as Google Docs, MobileMe, Dropbox, etc.

Second, it is difficult to add a signature to a document because you are limited to the width of the iPhone screen in landscape mode.  Zosh solves this problem by automatically scrolling a window while you are signing.  It would be useful if Touch-Fill-Go could do the same thing.

Third, I wish that the app would let you crop or adjust the brightness/contrast on a document AFTER you start to annotate it.  Adjusting any of those settings results in the app erasing all of your annotations.

The developer of this app is EarthLink.  Yes, that EarthLink, the internet service provider.  I don’t really understand how this iPhone app fits into the company’s core business.  I imagine that one of its employees just developed this cool app on his own, perhaps just because he wanted to use it himself, and the company decided to sell the app under its name.  EarthLink was kind enough to provide me with a free copy of this app for review purposes, but has not yet responded to my question on how this app fits in with the rest of the EarthLink business.  I mention this only because I hope that EarthLink recognizes the value of this gem of an app and continues to improve it, even if it is just an ancillary business for the company.  Indeed, I wish that there was some way to merge the best features of
Touch-Fill-Go and Zosh, because the result would be an amazingly
powerful app.

If you need to annotate a PDF file that you can access on the internet, or if you have a physical document that you want to scan and fill out, this is an incredibly useful app.  And if EarthLink adds a few more features, then this app could become essential for many lawyers and others who work with a lot of documents that need to be annotated or filled out.

Click here for Touch-Fill-Go ($2.99 sale): 

In March of 2008 and 2009, Apple took the opportunity to preview the next version of the operating system for the iPhone.  The target audience has always been developers, who need to start getting their iPhone apps ready before the new operating system comes out, but mere iPhone users also have a chance to learn what is coming next.  On March 6, 2008, Apple announced iPhone Software 2.0, which allowed third party apps for the first time.  This was the single biggest change that Apple ever made to the iPhone, and today it is hard to imagine the iPhone without apps.  The picture on the invitation for the 2.0 announcement was:

A few weeks ago on March 17, in addition to thinking green, I also thought about the fact that Apple had not yet announced anything about iPhone 4.0.  Of course, at the time, everyone was focused on the iPad and not the iPhone, but I did wonder whether we would see an announcement soon.

Yesterday, two days after the iPad first went on sale, Apple announced that this Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 10 am Pacific, Apple will preview iPhone OS 4.0.  The picture on the invitation sent to selected members of the press is:

 

I’m sure that Apple has known for many weeks that they would have this announcement, but the company didn’t tell the world because Apple wanted the focus to remain on the iPad.  But now that the iPad is out there, developers really need to know about the new software ASAP, so Apple cannot wait much longer to have this announcement.

What will we see on Thursday?  Considering how major the iPhone 2.0 and 3.0 announcements were, people are expecting quite a bit.  Probably the #1 feature being requested for the iPhone and the iPad — I presume that iPhone 4.0 will work on both devices — is the ability to run multiple apps at the same time with some apps running in the background.  Who knows whether this feature will be announced, but I do notice that the picture on the invitation for this Thursday includes the number four IN THE BACKGROUND.  I know, I know, I’m probably reading too much into a picture, but you have to admit that this is at least a possible explanation.  We’ll see in a few days.

As important as the Thursday announcement will be, it is really only one half of the big iPhone news for 2010.  I also expect to see new iPhone hardware this year, perhaps announced around June 28, 2010 because that is when an anonymous “corporate event” thought to be Apple is scheduled for the Moscone Center in San Francisco.  But because I expect that iPhone OS 4.0 will work on most or all current iPhones in addition to the iPhone that Apple will announce this summer — which I’m guessing will be called the iPhone HD — the announcement this Thursday will be more important for a greater number of iPhone users. 

I am excited to see what we learn on Thursday, and you can be sure that I will discuss it here on Friday.

The big iPhone-related news of this week was the iPad, and the anticipation is  growing for the big launch tomorrow.  But the news wasn’t all iPad, and here are some of the iPhone-related items of interest that caught my attention over the last few days.

• Earlier this week, I posted a list of the apps discussed during the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes presentation that Reid Trautz and I gave at ABA TECHSHOW.  Rachel M. Zahorsky of the ABA Journal (who you may know from Twitter as LawScribbler) wrote this article on our presentation, giving more info on a few of those apps.  By the way, I met a ton of great people who work for the ABA Journal at TECHSHOW, including editor and publisher Ed Adams (Twitter), Molly McDonough (Twitter), Sarah Randag (BlawgWhisperer on Twitter), the person who anonymously posts on Twitter as ABAesq (who told me that he/she may reveal himself/herself soon), and many others.  I included the Twitter handles because all of those people are worth following.
• Speaking of the ABA Journal, its most recent (and very unscientific) online poll asked what smartphone lawyers carry.  The results show that 27% use an iPhone, right behind 34% who use a Blackberry.
• Writers for The Chicago Lawyer were also in attendance at the 60 Apps in
  
  60 Minutes presentation.  They — I’m not sure whether it was Paul Zelewsky or David
  
  Glynn — posted this
  
  article identifying a few of their favorite apps for lawyers from
  
  the over 60 we discussed in our presentation.
• Ben Stevens, my co-presenter at my other TECHSHOW presentation last week, posted some interesting reflections
  
  on TECHSHOW.
• The U.S. Army is talking to Apple about using iPhones.
• Brad Stone of the New York Times writes about Tony Fadell, one of the key creators of the original iPod, who severed most of his formal ties with Apple in 2008 and has now officially ended his remaining consulting relationship with Apple.  Thanks, Tony, for all that you have done.
• Ryan Ray of iPhone Nuts discusses iPhone apps that are useful for students.
• I have never jailbroken my iPhone and have no plans to do so.  Thus, I won’t be able to use this app, but as a former Treo 650 user I can’t help but be amused at an app for jailbroken iPhones from StyleTap that emulates a Palm on an iPhone, as reported by Josh Topolsky of Engadget.  Every useful program that I ever ran on my Treo 650 exists in a better form on the iPhone, so I don’t see much use here, but it does bring back memories.
• Ross Rubin of Engadget discusses Zosh, a useful app that I reviewed this past December.
• Do you use Quickoffice?  (My most recent review is here.)  Would you like to win $250?  If you go to this thread on the Quickoffice Facebook page and post a story of how Quickoffice helped you to accomplish an important business or personal task, you have a chance to win a $250 iTunes gift card or a $250 Visa gift card (your choice).  That money would be useful to help you pay for a new iPad or to save for the next version of the iPhone.
• And for the record, as I told folks at TECHSHOW last week, my prediction is that the next iPhone will be announced this June and will be called iPhone HD, based on nothing more than my guess that we will see an HD camera in the next iPhone, just like you now see in the tiny Flip MinoHD.
• Yukari Iwatani Kane, Ting-I Tsai and Niraj Sheth of the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting article on the iPhone and AT&T.  First, they predict that the iPhone is coming to other carriers this year.  That’s possible, but I won’t believe that rumor until I see it.  Whether you believe that rumor or not, there are lots of other interesting tidbits in the article such as “According to comScore Inc., AT&T has over 43% of all U.S. smart-phone customers, compared with 23% for Verizon” and “For several quarters, AT&T’s growth has come almost single-handedly from the iPhone.”
• Niraj Sheth of the Wall Street Journal also reports on AT&T’s efforts to improve its network to deal with iPhone users.  The article notes:  “In mid-December, AT&T executives set up a 100-day plan to
  
  dramatically improve the company’s network in densely-populated cities,
  
  according to people familiar with the plan. Since then, AT&T has
  
  added new network spectrum to better handle traffic, repositioned
  
  antennas to improve reception in office towers and wired more
  
  neighborhood cell towers with faster connections.”  And he reports that it is not just AT&T making changes; Apple has been as well:  “Apple rejiggered how its phones communicate with AT&T’s towers. As
  
  a result, the phones now put less of a load on the network for such
  
  simple tasks as finding the closest tower or checking for available
  
  text messages.”
• If you subscribe to MobileMe, you will be happy to learn that Apple updated the iPhone MobileMe Gallery app this week to make it easier to see your friends’ pictures, as noted by Serenity Caldwell of Macworld.
• The iPhone may not have the most powerful camera in the world, but it can still take some pretty powerful pictures as demonstrated by Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder’s pictures of Afghanistan.  (Link via Daring Fireball)
• And finally, a company called Jailbreak Collective is selling iPhone app magnets.  The website says that they are currently sold out but will have new shipments in late April.  They cost $12.99 and allow you to make your refrigerator look like your iPhone.  They also sell a cute app T-shirt, but the magnets are my favorite.  (Link via iPhone Savior)

 

The iPad is coming!  The iPad is coming!  If you ordered your iPad
early, you can pick it up at the Apple Store this Saturday.  Or if you
asked for it to be shipped directly to you, I’ve seen several reports of
units being shipped out of China a few days ago, so they should be in
your hands soon.  If you just show up at an Apple Store this Saturday, I
suspect that you’ll find them out of stock, but most Best Buy stores
are supposed to get a few units so you might have better luck there.

There was much coverage of the iPad earlier this week.  Brad Stone of the New York Times wondered
whether the iPad could live up to the hype.  Adding to that hype, in
the cover story on this week’s Newsweek, Dan
Lyons said
that the iPad could change everything.  And Josh Topolsky of Engadget posted a comprehensive preview.

But now some of the real reviews are in.  Apple sent several reviewers their very own iPads about a week ago, and around 9pm Central last night, Apple lifted its embargo and allowed those reviewers to talk about the iPad.  The initial reviews have been glowing.  Here are the ones that I have seen so far:

• David Pogue of the New York Times
• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal
• Andy Ihnatko of The Chicago Sun-Times, with additional articles 1, 2, 3 and 4.  Also, Ihnatko is posting videos to his YouTube page.
• Ed Baig of USA Today
• Tim Gideon of PC Magazine
• Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing
• Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus of the Houston Chronicle
• Omar Wasow of The Root
• Also, last night, MacBreak Weekly episode 188 was recorded with Andy Ihnatko showing off his iPad and Alex Lindsay asking questions.  I watched it live on TWiT Live, and when it is posted online, you will find it here as well as in iTunes.

If you want to learn more about what the different built-in apps on the iPad
look like, earlier this week Apple posted Guided Tours of
several of the apps.

Because the iPad runs the iPhone OS, I plan to include some discussion of the iPad on iPhone J.D.  But if you want even more iPad news for lawyers, I recommend two websites.  First, Tablet Legal.  This was the first
website dedicated to the use of iPads by lawyers.  Josh Barrett has
been doing a great job with this site, and I’m sure it’s going to get
even better once he gets his iPad.  For example, here is a great article on the great expectations for legal apps on the iPad.

Second, I am looking forward to The iPad Lawyer.  Ben Stevens
of The Mac Lawyer
fame announced at ABA TECHSHOW during a presentation that we gave
together that he will debut The iPad Lawyer very soon; for now, the site just redirects to The Mac Lawyer.  Ben told me
that he ordered a 64 GB iPad (the non-3G model).

But of course, all of the regular legal technology sites are likely to be flush with iPad coverage, especially over the next few days and weeks.  One recent example worth noting is this article by Randall Ryder of The Lawyerist explaining how the iPad would be useful during meetings with clients.

Yesterday afternoon, Apple released an update to iTunes on the Mac and PC, bringing the version number to 9.1.  The primary reason for the update was to get iTunes ready for the iPad, but there are a few minor changes that iPhone owners will notice.

First, there are some cosmetic changes to the Summary tab that appears when you connect your iPhone to iTunes.  Here is a comparison.  The Summary tab in 9.0 had the different regions in either white or gray:

The new Summary tab in iTunes 9.1 now has gray boxes around each region:

 

A minor cosmetic change, but I suppose that someone at Apple though it looked better this way.  The only new feature on the Summary tab is the addition of the option “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” for the iPhone (and iPod touch), an option that used to only work with the iPod nano and Shuffle.  If you have songs in iTunes at a very high bit rate to give you super high quality, you can choose to instead sync a 128 kbps version of the song to your iPhone to save some space on your iPhone.

Another minor change is that the tab at the top of the iPhone section of iTunes that used to say Applications now simply says Apps.  The new short name for the tab makes sense because everyone calls them apps anyway, but additionally the shortening of that tab gave Apple room to add an additional tab called Books.  Before iTunes 9.1, audio books were handled under the Music tab.  Now, both audio books and the new iBooks that Apple will be selling for the iPad are placed under the new Books tab.

I also noticed a very minor change on the Apps tab that might be cosmetic but has the potential to add functionality.  Previously, you could sort items by name, category or date by pressing a button.  Now, you have those same choices in a pop-up list.  This change makes it easier to add other sort fields in the future.  (For example, perhaps there will be different ways to sort iPad versus iPhone apps?  We’ll find out this Saturday.)  Here is the old way (on the left) and the new way under iTunes 9.1 (on the right):

    

If you use Genius Mixes (I don’t), iTunes 9.1 now lets you rename, rearrange or remove those mixes.  Additionally, seven security flaws on the Windows version of iTunes and one security flaw on some of the Mac versions of iTunes have been addressed, which is always nice.